lofton.net

HCI 513 was basically a class about “An integrated study of design, technical, and strategic issues for Internet commerce”. Since I work full time as a web administrator I didn’t think I would learn much, but the professor was very informed and provided addiitional insight into the various aspects of e-commerce. Particularly, I learned even with the nice web services offered by FedEx and UPS, that implementing shipping on an e-commerce site is fairly complex. The projects we have worked on at work always charged a flat rate, although we are working on an implementation now that integrates our publishing group’s DB, which has a shipping calculator. But that is done on the inventory/fullfillment app side, so all we do is pass the address and get the data back from the API.

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I have been to Japan several times now. Each trip has been enjoyable and thought provoking. Being married to a Japanese means that I do not see just the tourist areas, but instead have had the opportunity to see daily Japanese life. First, I love japanese food (that is an understatement), so that makes staying there quite easy. Second, well I mentioned it already, I am married to a Japanese.

I will post some of my journals from the trips over the past year at some point soon. Actually, that is another reason why I started to put this site together. The main banner for this site (the standard design) is from a shot I took from Fujisawa city where my inlaws live. It was during December 2003. I don’t speak Japanese yet, but am planning on learning (well, I have been studying on my own, but it is slow going, until I finish my grad degree). At any rate, I mentioned in conversation with my wife’s family, that I was going out to take a picture of Mt Fuji from the roof of their apartment (which my wife translated) and her dad laughed because he did not think I would get much. I went up on the roof of the apartment and could see Fuji-san quite clearly and took some good shots. As I said above, I will post more pics and text when I have time.

lofton.net contains stories and info posted by jim lofton. Since I am a web designer/developer, most stuff will probably relate to that, but I have a wide variety of interests and will write about those from time to time as well. This site also gives me a chance to try things out that I might not do for my regular job.

I have a BA in Graphic Design from UIC and a Masters in Human Computer Interaction from Depaul. My web experience goes back to 1996 when I first learned about HTML. Since then, I have learned PERL, PHP, ASP/VBscript, SQL, CSS, XHTML, XML and a whole bunch of other web things. I use software tools like Photoshop, Dreamweaver, BBedit, UltraEdit, Fireworks, and Flash. As well as MySQL, MSSQL, Apache, IIS, WinMedia server and other web infrastructure tools.

I have doing user experience research the last couple years now. This includes heuristic reviews, contextual inquiries, card sorts, and of course usability tests. I have been interested in creating and using online low to mid-fidelity prototypes for usability tests rather than paper prototypes. Combined with screen capture software, it really makes turning around findings and creating reports a lot easier.

Before the web, I worked as a print designer, doing a lot of work in Illustrator and Quark. I was pretty much an expert user of Illustrator (lots of technical schematics and an occasional illustration), although I haven’t used it much in the last few years. As a print designer, I worked exclusively on Macs (well before that I used T-square, technical pens and wax gun), but when I first started on the web I was forced to use Windows. Which was a nuisance, but I really wanted to do web stuff. I was moved from the marketing group to IS… I told them I could do the web as long as they didn’t need anything printed. I had enough experience trying to produce print jobs with Windows at that time to know it was a mess.

Actually, it wasn’t that hard to switch to Windows, as I would help friends use their PCs, and at that time the Mac OS was kind of lagging. Not that Windows was better, but this was in 1996 and Mac OS 7 was 6 years old… and it just didn’t have the appeal of a truly usable OS any longer. Using Windows to do the web was actually easier, as there were a whole lot more HTML editors and I could use Photoshop which was the same on both platforms (as long as you didn’t need to print).

I continued to use Mac at home, but used Windows at work almost exclusively for the last 8 years. However, I have started to transition back to the Mac at work, now that OS X is so impressive. I can run Apache, PHP, MySQL and I can do all web related work easily as I could on the PC. My current system is a white Macbook 13″ with 4GB ram and it is sweet. Using Windows XP or Vista really seems kludgy/flakey now, but of course you need to test web sites in IE (at least until Mozilla/Firefox can overcome it). In the end an OS is only a platform, it is the apps that you use to accomplish most tasks. So I constantly switch between Mac and Windows everyday.

I am taking a class on the issues of designing software/websites for the disabled. It is very informative so far. It seems that many businesses are ignoring this at their peril. While one case was dismissed two years ago (Southwest Airlines), another went against the organization (Marta), and several more were settled out of court for nominal sums. Well nominal in the sense that they could have spent that money upfront on accessibility and avoided the negative publicity.
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